


holding onto something good

by fiveyaaas



Series: under mistletoe [22]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Friends, Christmas Presents, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, I am so tired, also it is four twenty seven as i post this, has me reeling, the realization that this is just a fluffier version of another fic i’m posting tongiht
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28404540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/pseuds/fiveyaaas
Summary: “ They had not grown up in a warm home.It wasn’t something that anybody would ever argue with. Five supposed that some people would try to argue that their father loved them ‘in his own way,’ and he supposed that was true. If one could consider in Reginald Hargreeves’s own way of showing love to be anything… human.So, really, no. He didn’t love them. Not in the way that they wanted to be loved, and not in a way that mattered. ”
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Series: under mistletoe [22]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2036878
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11
Collections: Harcest Ficmas 2020





	holding onto something good

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fivebyseven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fivebyseven/gifts).



They had not grown up in a warm home. 

It wasn’t something that anybody would ever argue with. Five supposed that some people would try to argue that their father loved them ‘in his own way,’ and he supposed that was true. If one could consider in Reginald Hargreeves’s own way of showing love to be anything… human. 

So, really, no. He didn’t love them. Not in the way that they wanted to be loved, and not in a way that  _ mattered.  _

Their home was not warm, but there were ways to find warmth, searching for silver linings in a dull and lackluster place. Five found it in Seven, his favorite. She didn’t have powers, but not having them had made her much more extraordinary than the others. He liked to spend time with her, liked her more than any of their siblings. Seven was the home he wanted to have. 

But, the home they did have did not  _ want  _ her. 

Five was not an idiot. He could see the way Seven tried to get the others’ attention all the time, could see the way that she’d have to hide her tears the second Father berated her. She wasn’t liked by any of them. Five was all she had, and, though he couldn’t exactly say that he  _ didn’t _ enjoy that he got her all to himself, he did know that it made her sad that she was never included in anything. So, he tried his best to make sure that, even though he was all she had, he was enough. 

They learned about Christmas for the first time when they were six years old, after sneaking into Five’s hideout to watch a movie during freetime. Several years later, Father would throw a Christmas party for the public, but, when they were kids, they didn’t know about most holidays. 

Holidays were odd to Five, especially with how they were portrayed in movies. The families always wanted to be together, and there were all kinds of traditions that Five didn’t truly understand. Seven asked for more movies dealing with holidays in the future, claiming that they always made her happy, so he started to mentally document patterns of them. From what he could gather, Christmas was about buying people things but people got mad if one described it that way, which perplexed Five to no end. 

One day, he decided he would throw a Christmas for Seven in his hideout. He did it during the summer, not wanting Father to find out what they were doing if they ever got caught. Plus, because he wanted it to be a surprise, he didn’t tell Seven. 

It wasn’t all that special. All he’d done was gather some candies (stolen), presents (stolen), and stringed lights (borrowed but might as well be stolen), but Seven gasped the second she saw all of it, smiling at him widely, and he was reassured in the fact that he  _ deserved _ to be the one that got all of her attention. 

“How did you do this?” Seven asked him. They were eight years old now. Five’s training got increasingly worse each time. 

“I jumped,” Five explained. “You know how I’ve been practicing that more?” Some days, he would jump until he vomited all over the training mats and Father would tell him to keep going. “Well, I was able to go to a few places, so that we could celebrate… because you said that the movies made you happy-”

Seven wrapped her arms around him, embracing him until he eventually embraced her back. 

“Thank you,” she murmured. 

“It’s no problem,” Five told her, shrugging. “We can’t really do anything else because we only have thirty minutes, but I got you a few gifts.”

“How did you get them without money?”

“I have my ways.” (To clarify, stealing.)

She raised her brows but didn’t argue. Five hadn’t been able to wrap the gifts in anything but pages from some fancy first edition book from Father’s personal library, but she didn’t seem to mind at all when he handed them to her, chewing on a piece of candy and shuddering when it was sour. As Seven tore into the paper, he watched on in anticipation. 

He’d gotten her three books, mainly because they were easiest to wrap. She loved them all, hugging him after each one she unwrapped. He kept the stringed lights in the hideout when they left, figuring that they’d be useful once she intended to read them during the next free time. 

It became a tradition for them, celebrating the holiday at random times during the year. For the most part, they only had one holiday per year, but one particularly difficult year, they had three. 

And then, when he was thirteen, he made the choice to travel time.

He hadn’t known when he jumped that he would be leaving her behind for her to age and then eventually die. If he had, there would have been absolutely no way he would have done it. Vanya hadn’t died of natural causes, unless one considered the end of the world a natural cause. 

All of his family was dead. Everybody in the  _ world  _ was dead. 

He trudged through the remains of his family home, hoping to find his old hideout. It was impossible to find among the detritus. Five kept screaming all of their names, mainly Vanya’s, hoping that she or somebody else would pop up and say, ‘Where have you been?’

For forty five years, he found not a single soul at all. He could recognize that Dolores wasn’t like him, wasn’t alive, but she was all he had. Keeping her around was necessary, lest he lose the will to keep going at all. 

Five also had Vanya’s book. 

The day he’d found it, he hadn’t chosen to read it at all, just hugging the book to his chest, pressing his nose against it and imagining he was burying his head into her hair. If he closed his eyes tight enough and pretended hard enough, it was like they were actually embracing again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!💕


End file.
